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Zadie Smith attended a preview evening hosted by Hamish Hamilton on Tuesday 4th July, to introduce her first historical fiction novel, The Fraud.
The event was held at William IV Pub in north-west London, opposite the cemetery where one of the book’s main characters is buried.
The evening began with Smith reading a passage from her new book, a “kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England". In her reading, Smith impersonated Eliza Touchet, "the Scottish housekeeper – and cousin by marriage – of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for 30 years".
The discussion that followed covered everything from Charles Dickens to climate change, and how Smith found herself writing a historical fiction novel. She discussed the role that Dickens has played in her writing and the new book, saying: "Dickens is one of my people. I don’t always love him, sometimes he really does annoy me, but I recognise him, I think all novelists do.
"I think there’s a huge amount of novelists who wouldn’t be novelists if they hadn’t read Dickens at some point as a child. The thing he does is animate people, he makes them alive."
Opening in 1873 and based on real historical events, The Fraud is described by the publisher as “a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of other people". It will be published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in hardback, e-book and audio on 7th September 2023, and simultaneously in the US by Penguin Press.